It would be useful to have another emphasis mode button in the note card area, for text and titles, making editing a lot quicker.
Also I can apply emphasis mode to text and titles independent off the PDF this would apply to other text added to the the mind map.

I agree this is an important feature. Actually, I’m routinely surprised that it’s missing from MarginNote. As it stands now, there is no way to italicize quoted text in notecards. This is important for capturing emphasis in the original text being quoted, such as for special terms in foreign languages (e.g., mono no aware) or titles of books and other sources.

I am using MarginNote right now and there are many notes containing italicized text which I cannot reproduce in notecards. Current choice of emphasis is bold only, which in fact is rarely used and actively discouraged in academic publishing.

What do you think about adding this feature that @Rebs suggested? I.e., Emphasis > Italic

Hi @mobo ,
The Emphasis is designed for using “recall mode” and the Cloze Anki card. Could you please make it clear that how the Emphasis mode working with academic publishing and how the MN working with academic publishing. It’s amazing for what we think the serious public is based on latex or sth.
Or just mean that Italic is a domain custom.

Thanks for your message. What I mean is that the general rule in professional and academic publishing is that only italics are used for emphasis, not bold. So, in the PDFs that most academics/researchers/journalists/etc are studying with MarginNote, titles, foreign words, passages with words emphasized, etc. — they will almost always use italics, not bold. There is only one level of emphasis: italics.

If we want to make notecards and reproduce the emphasis in the original text (e.g., titles), we need an option for italics. Right now, there is no way to add italics to a notecard in MarginNote, only bold.

The request, then, would be to add two options to the notecard popup menu: Emphasis > Italic and Emphasis > Bold.

Thanks for the update. FWIW, I never use handwriting recognition and I’m pretty sure that I never will. It’s not a feature that I need. However, I do need the other features that I have asked about — very simple features that I have asked about a number of times, now.

If I may ask, what does an app for “academic scenarios” mean for your team?

Does it mean (1) an app to help students memorize information? Does it mean (2) an app to help academic researchers? Both? How would you define this?

I would say that (1) and (2) are in fact different audiences of users. Memorizing is important for people doing exam prep, but that’s not mainly what researchers are doing. It’s a different activity. Research is not focused on the memorization of existing knowledge. We’re not taking exams. It’s about the production of new knowledge, and that means a different approach to study, a different work process.

I’m not sure what the “cultural difference” is that you’re talking about. FWIW, I have been working at a high-level research university in East Asia for over ten years now. I see how research is conducted by my colleagues here, I work with them and the basic methods are really not significantly different than in the US, UK, or Europe. Research is research. As far as I can see, there is no particular “Asian mode” of research. There are different ideas and theoretical approaches, of course, and people are coming from very different traditions of thought, but the basic methods are the same.

We are today living with the reality of a global market for higher education. Regardless of culture and context, all active researchers are focused on reading, taking notes, writing, and publishing. This includes graduate students writing theses and dissertations, faculty, and many people in industry. But the basic model comes from the university.

If you examine the system of ranking all the research universities in the world, you will discover that the most important factor is the quality and quantity of publications (articles, books, etc.). That’s what academic researchers in all parts of the world are doing: working on those publications. The phrase “publish or perish!” is a truism.

If your company wants to make an app for people doing academic research, then, I would submit that you try to forget about “culture” as it’s really not a relevant factor.

But maybe your company is not interested in this market of academic researchers? I cannot say.

I can say that there are many of us, and there are not enough good tools. That means there is a market opportunity here, for a company that produces the right kind of app. MarginNote is pretty good, but right now I still cannot recommend it to my colleagues.

I’m not sure what the “cultural difference” is that you’re talking about.

They will almost always use italics, not bold.

The culture I was just talking about is only within Emphasis fonts. We use bold because it just more often in Chinese characters to use it as an emphasis sign.

I realised in universal research, Latin alphabet always use italics. I must admit that we didn’t clean out a monoblock of time at past to specialise alphabet scenes optimisation. And I think this is an essential thing to solve specially.

In CN market, we pay too much attention to solving students memorisation. Both CEO&Developer Min and I have the vision to make MarginNote adapt to Researching demands. But we are alone. It’s a huge work to achieve.

So we make a compromise. We plan to open any API we could in marginnote 4.0 this summer and give users SDK to optimise export for researcher’s software compatible like DOI in Mendeley. There will also be an expanded UI for plugin. Personally, once I did a little academic when I was at college. I hope the software could do more to help science not only exams.

If you are planning to make MarginNote more open, may I suggest AppleScript? It is fairly standard for macOS apps, and right now MarginNote doesn’t support it at all.

Ideally, MarginNote could provide both an API and support for AppleScript, but I understand it takes time to implement this. One advantage of AppleScript vs. an API for “C” is that you could get more people involved in writing scripts. For plugins or extensions, by contrast, the potential audience of developers is probably much smaller, they will need to sign up with Apple’s Developer Program, etc.

Either way, an API+SDK or AppleScript support would not solve the issue that started this thread: the ability to add italics to text on notecards. So, while it would be good to have a more open version of MarginNote (and I hope you will pursue that), it would not address this particular issue.

It is unfortunate that your team is not in agreement about building an app for researchers, especially since I suspect it would not be much work for your developers to fix some of the issues we’ve been discussing.

I upgraded to 3.6.6, but something is odd when I try to italicize text in the excerpt field.

If I select Format > Font > Italic from the menu bar, or Font > Italic from the right-click menu, the text is italicized as expected. However, as soon as I leave the note and move to another one, it reverts back to normal text, with no emphasis. The change doesn’t stick.